Will you please turn to 1 Thessalonians?
And the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly;
and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Faithful is He that calleth you, Who will also do it.
Will you please turn to the book of Matthew, chapter 10? We will read from verses 34 to 39.
Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law:
and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me;
and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.
And he that doth not take his cross and follow after Me, is not worthy of Me.
He that findeth his life shall lose it;
and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.
Let us have a word of prayer.
Dear Lord, as we gather here in Thy presence, our hearts bow low before Thee. We acknowledge Thee as our Lord. Thou art the Lord of this gathering, and we look to Thee to be with us this morning.
We pray that Thou wilt open our hearts, that we may see in our hearts; open our ears, that we may hear Thy voice. May Thy Holy Spirit open Thy Word to us, and may Thy Word fall into good ground, that it may bear fruit a hundredfold unto Thy glory.
We commit this time into Thy loving hands, trusting Thee that Thou wilt do Thy work and Thou wilt be glorified. We ask in Thy precious name. Amen.
We do thank the Lord for gathering us again this morning. Every time we get together, we feel that it is the mercy of God. We wonder why God should be so gracious to us, unless He knows our situation. He wants to speak to us. He wants to do His work with us. He wants to prepare us for His imminent return.
So we do get together this morning with a grateful heart.
We have read in 1 Thessalonians 5: “May the God of peace sanctify you wholly; your whole spirit, soul, and body being preserved for the coming of the Lord.” He who calls you is faithful, and He will perform it.
God’s will is to sanctify our whole being. He wants to set us apart for Himself—not just a part of our being, but the whole of our being. He wants to sanctify our spirit. He wants to sanctify our soul. And He wants to sanctify our body. This is God’s purpose for each one of us.
We have been considering together this whole matter of spiritual exercise. We confess that spiritual life is a life in the spirit and of the Spirit. But it is not only that our spirit may be sanctified. We find that God’s will is that our soul also needs to be sanctified. And not only that, but even our body—He wants to sanctify it.
We exercise our body in order to keep our body healthy, but physical exercise will not sanctify our body. If we exercise our mind, we may develop a brilliant mind. We may get a lot of information. We may have much knowledge, even biblical knowledge. But that will not sanctify our soul.
On the contrary, oftentimes we find that the more we exercise our mind, the less spiritual we become, because we allow our soul to become a substitute for our spirit. God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth.
So, dear brothers and sisters, we have to see that spiritual exercise is not only the way to strengthen our spirit. It is the means by which our soul may be sanctified, so that our spirit may truly be in union with God’s Spirit.
We believe that as our spirit is strengthened, it will affect our soul and our body. We believe that our soul is sanctified, not merely by exercising our soul, but through spiritual exercise. And the same is true with our body.
This time, as we get together, we would like to use this opportunity to see how spiritual exercise affects our soul and our body.
We know that God’s salvation, as we see in 2 Corinthians 1:10, is in three stages. We were delivered, we are being delivered, and we shall yet be delivered.
Not only were we delivered from death, but daily we are being delivered, and in the future we shall be totally delivered. In other words, salvation will not only touch our spirit; it will also touch our soul and reach our body. This is the will of God.
We all remember how we came to the Lord. We were dead in sins and transgressions. We were wholly hopeless. But thank God, He saved us. The Bible tells us, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
That which is born of the Spirit—that is, born of the Holy Spirit—is spirit. The result is a new human spirit.
Why is this so? It is because when God created us, we were tripartite. God used the dust of the earth to give us a body. Then God breathed into our nostrils. The breath of God came into this body directly from God, and therefore God’s breath is our spirit.
He breathed His breath into us that we might have a spirit. As the spirit and the body interacted, they produced our soul—our person.
According to God’s order, He wants our spirit to be the master and our soul to be the servant. In other words, He communicates Himself to our spirit. Communication with God must be with the spirit.
As our spirit receives from God, then it orders our soul. Our soul opens itself to receive what the spirit shows—that is to say, to receive the will of God. We are willing to do the will of God, and then our soul gives command to our body to act it out. This is the divine order of man.
But we all know that our forefathers ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Bible tells us that they actually lived for hundreds of years, and they had sons and daughters. Their body was still alive, and their soul was very much alive. They did not die physically on the day they ate of the forbidden tree.
But God’s Word is exact. We believe that on the day our forefathers ate the forbidden fruit, they died. What had died? It was not the body. It was not the soul. It was the spirit.
In other words, after man sinned, his spirit was dead unto God. What remained was the soul and the body. According to Genesis 6:3, man had become flesh.
What is flesh? Flesh is the combination of soul and body without the spirit. Man became flesh. In other words, man began to live completely by his soul and by his body.
A man of high degree may live according to his soul, and a man of low degree may live by the passions, loves, and lusts of his body. But his spirit is dead.
Death in Scripture does not mean that something is annihilated. The organ of the spirit is still there, but it has lost its proper communication. It cannot communicate with God, and that is death. The organ is there, but its function is in a coma. Man lives completely by his soul and body.
But thank God, when He saves us, He begins with our spirit. That is the way God always works: from the center to the circumference. The enemy’s work is always from the circumference, touching the center.
When God saves us, He begins with our spirit. Our spirit was dead in sins and transgressions, but the Lord does a wonderful work. His Holy Spirit comes and begets us. He touches our dead spirit, cleanses our dead spirit from sins, and gives us a new spirit.
As soon as we believe in the Lord Jesus, immediately there is communication with the proper environment of our spirit, which is God. We cry out, “Abba, Father.”
The Bible also tells us that the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in our spirit. He is the other Comforter, and He is in us and will be with us forever. He is our resident Teacher, and He will teach us and bring us into God’s full purpose.
A person who has believed in the Lord Jesus has been given a new life, the life of Christ Jesus. He enters into our new spirit, and the Holy Spirit, the law of life, works in us.
We have a new spirit. The life of our Lord Jesus dwells in us. Christ is the life of the new spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the law of life. He will lead us until we are united with Christ.
That is our initial salvation. That is what we possess at the time we believe in the Lord Jesus. It is the will of God that His life in our spirit will continue to grow into maturity, that we may be conformed to the image of the Beloved.
It is through the working of the Holy Spirit upon our spirit that He will bring this to pass. These things we have talked about before.
But now we want to ask this question: when you are saved, your spirit is renewed, but what about your soul? How about your body?
When we believe in the Lord Jesus, we have to repent of our sins. Repentance is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit works upon our spirit, and somehow we wake up for a while and begin to realize our sins. We repent of our sins.
Somehow the Holy Spirit enlightens us and shows us that the only salvation is in Christ Jesus. After we repent, we believe, and our spirit is renewed. This is what happens when we believe in the Lord.
Repentance is a change of mind. So it shows that when we believe in the Lord Jesus, there is something happening even in our soul. But that change is superficial, and very soon we find that we return to our old ways.
The same thing is true with our body. You can see the difference between a person who is saved and one who is not saved. A person who has a long face may become bright when he is saved. There is a change, but it is very superficial.
In other words, this mortal body is still a mortal body. It is corruptible and remains corruptible. When we are saved, the work is basically in our spirit. So far as our soul and body are concerned, they are still, as usual, the old flesh.
I believe that this is our common experience. When you first believe in the Lord Jesus, if your initial salvation is thorough, the love of Christ constrains you. At the time you are saved, and for a short period afterward, you seem to be a changed person.
You love the Lord. You love to pray. You love to read the Bible. You love to be with brothers and sisters. If at that time the Lord should ask you to do anything, there is nothing too hard. You are walking in the third heaven.
Everything has changed. The birds sing, the leaves look green, and everything seems to have changed. But unfortunately, the depth has not been touched.
In other words, even though Christ lives in your spirit, who lives in your soul? What is the life of your soul, as well as the life of your body? You find that it is the same old Adamic life. We call it self.
Christ dwells in your spirit, but self still dwells in your soul and body. Very soon you will discover one thing: there is a conflict between your spirit and your soul.
You find that in Romans 7. Somehow your spirit seems to be striving against your flesh. Because the new life in your spirit is still very young, while the old life in your soul and body is the old Adam.
Often, in that kind of struggle, the young life cannot overcome the old Adamic life. So it is a conflict of two lives.
The life of Christ in your spirit wants to lead you into Christ. It is heavenly; it is spiritual. But there is another life within you which is natural, earthly, and even devilish.
Who can deliver me from this body of death? The deliverance is not found in dealing with your soul and body alone. Deliverance comes from within. As the life of Christ is strengthened, He will begin to displace the self-life.
That is what we find in Ephesians 3. First of all, we find the apostle Paul’s second prayer in Ephesians 3:16–17.
That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inward man;
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;
to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love.
Here we find that the Holy Spirit strengthens our inner man. The inner man means the spirit. The Holy Spirit strengthens our spirit.
What is the result? The result is that Christ, who dwells in our spirit, will through faith dwell in our heart. In other words, Christ has entered from our spirit into our soul.
He comes to displace the self-life, and He will sit on the throne of your heart. He will be in control, and He will use all the functions of your soul, that you may know the love of God which surpasses understanding.
In the Bible, there is a truth called the salvation of the soul. We often hear of salvation, but to us salvation seems to be limited to our spirit. It is true that this is the foundation, but salvation has to reach out to our soul and to our body.
To put it another way—not that this is one hundred percent exact—we may say that “we were delivered” refers to the salvation of our spirit; “we are being delivered” refers to the present salvation of our soul; and “we shall yet be delivered” refers to the future redemption of our body.
Of course, it is not that clear-cut, because our spirit is continually growing. The life of Christ is continually increasing in us. The salvation of our soul is continually being carried out every day. Finally, our body will be transformed.
Unfortunately, in Christianity today, people do not seem to understand the salvation of the soul.
The first letter of Peter is a letter whose theme is the salvation of the soul. Let us read 1 Peter 1:3–5.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who according to His great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you,
who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
Here we find a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. What is that salvation? Verse 9 tells us: “Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.”
If you read through the first epistle of Peter, you will find that the whole book centers upon the salvation of the soul. The same thing is true with the book of Hebrews.
People find Hebrews difficult to read because, if you are not careful, you may think that Hebrews teaches that you can lose your salvation. But that is not the theme of Hebrews.
You remember Hebrews 2:3. It has the term “so great salvation.” Hebrews is speaking about so great a salvation, and that great salvation is actually the salvation of the soul. If you know this, you find that there is really no contradiction in the Word of God.
Our Lord Jesus, in Matthew 11, says something with which we are very familiar. In verse 28 He says, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
We are also familiar with the verse following it: “Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.”
The first rest is rest in our spirit. The second shows us how to find rest in our soul. The salvation of the soul is closely related to bearing the cross.
Some people think that after you believe in the Lord Jesus, everything will be smooth sailing. We often say that you can sit down and be carried to heaven. But the Bible tells us there is a process through which we must go.
After we believe in the Lord Jesus and become His disciples, we have to take up our cross and follow Him. Are we not already saved? Yes, our spirit was saved. But now our soul needs to be saved.
The salvation of the soul is closely related to bearing the cross. The cross is the only way to get rid of the self-life and be filled with Christ’s life. If we refuse the cross, we refuse the crown.
All this is a foundation. Now we would like to talk about the real thing: how can spiritual exercise affect the salvation of our soul?
Do you want to have your soul saved? Transformation is in the soul. In order to be conformed to the image of Christ, the process of transformation has to go through the soul. It is through spiritual exercise that transformation is brought in.
This morning, we would like to talk about emotion.
We know that our soul is not physical, but we know our soul through its faculties, through its functions. How do I know that I have a soul? Number one: I have emotion. I have feeling.
If I had no soul, like a stone, then I would have no feeling. I would not feel cold or hot. I would not be grieved or happy. I would not love or hate. I have emotion, so I know that I have a soul.
Even a cat has a soul. A dog has a soul. But a mountain has no soul. It has a body—a huge body—but no soul and no spirit. All animals have soul as well as body, but they do not have a spirit. They do not have religious ideas. They cannot communicate with God.
Brothers and sisters, only man has spirit, soul, and body. We have a mind; we can think. We also have a will. When a person begins to express his will, nobody can hinder him.
It is the self-life that is in charge of all the functions of our soul. This morning we would like to see how spiritual exercise will save our soul, especially our emotion.
Emotion is the clearest expression of our soul-life. It can be stirred up very quickly, and it can be changed very quickly.
Emotion is the spice of life, but it is also the curse of life. Emotion can lift us to heaven and take us to hell. It shifts very quickly. If we are emotional persons, we are undependable.
But emotion is very essential. If we do not have emotion, then we are as dead. I heard a brother say, before he was saved, that he was a person who became angry very quickly. When he got angry, he said, “If I do not know how to be angry, I do not know that I am a man.”
Emotion is essential. Without emotion, life is dull and meaningless. There is nothing wrong with emotion.
We often think that a spiritual person has to be without emotion—that he must be as dull as possible. But that is not true, because emotion is a function of the soul. Emotion itself is neutral. It is not sinful in itself, nor is there any righteousness in itself.
Therefore, if you only deal with emotion and its expression, you are on the wrong track.
We all like children. Why are they so appealing? Because they are very natural. If they are angry, they are angry. If they are happy, they are happy. We all like that because we all know that we are pretending.
The more we grow up, the more we know how to hide our emotion, because emotions sometimes lead to disaster. So we become wise, as it were. We suppress our emotion, and we suppress it until we become sick.
Brothers and sisters, there is nothing wrong with emotion. If God makes you more emotional, thank God for that. If God makes you a less emotional person, that is fine. There is nothing wrong with emotion.
If you only deal with emotion, you are on the wrong track. It makes you—I do not like to say it—a hypocrite.
As a matter of fact, if you read the Bible, you find in Romans 1 a list of things, and one of the sins is to be without natural affection.
In Ephesians 4:18, we read of those who have become past feeling. If you cast off all feeling, then you give yourselves to lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
In other words, we are made with feeling. God made us that way. If we cast off all feeling, then we will do all kinds of wickedness.
What, then, is wrong with emotions? Why do they cause so much problem? How do we deal with them? How can we be saved from them?
You cannot deal with emotion itself. You have to deal with the root of emotion. Who is using that emotion? Who is expressing himself through that emotion?
Unfortunately, oftentimes emotion expresses ourselves. Myself is touched; therefore, I am unhappy. Myself is satisfied; therefore, I am glad. This is something I hate.
All our emotion is under the control of the self-life in the soul. The deliverance is in changing that life, so that Christ’s life may come into your soul and replace the self-life.
How does it happen? It happens through spiritual exercise.
The Holy Spirit begins to touch our conscience. He begins to enlighten our intuition. As we communicate with God in fellowship, we begin to realize how our emotion expresses ourselves.
We express our feelings according to how we ourselves feel. The standard for our emotion is according to our own understanding; it is not according to God’s will.
When we discover these things, the Holy Spirit will arrange circumstances which we will meet. God begins to point His finger and say, “You love what you should not love. You are glad when you should not be glad.”
There may be something that you have to give up, something to which your heart is attached, and it will lead you away from God. When the Holy Spirit reveals this in you and arranges your circumstances to show you, this is the time that you have to learn to bear the cross.
The cross is when what you feel is against what God feels. If you take up the cross and follow Him, if you lose your self-life for His sake, you will find the way of deliverance.
If you save your own soul-life, you will lose it. You lose it, brothers and sisters. That is why you find how the Lord will deal with our feelings.
The Lord seems to be saying something that we are really afraid of. We think that the Lord comes just to save, but we do not know how He saves. He tells us the way to save our feelings and to purify our emotion.
He says, “I came not to send peace on the earth.” The peace of this world is a false peace. He says, “I came to send a sword. I came to separate. I came to divide.”
What He comes to divide is something that is so natural. If He dealt only with something unnatural, that would be reasonable to us. But He will deal with us in all things that are so natural.
Or, to put it another way, He will do something which seems to be against His own Word. Does He not tell us to love our parents? This is one of the commandments. Does He not tell us to love our husbands or wives?
Brothers and sisters, here you find something extraordinary, something unreasonable, something unnatural; but it is spiritual. We should love our parents. We should love our husbands and wives. We should love our children. We should love ourselves. Do not waste your life. All these are good.
But when these things begin to conflict with God’s will, when they begin to lead us away from our love of God, when they begin to replace God with other persons or even things other than God, they need to be dealt with.
The reason for such dealing is that our soul, our emotion, may be purified. We will be sanctified.
Then we will begin to love in the way that God loves. We will truly love our father and mother, love our children, and even love our own life, but not with our natural, fallen selfishness.
That love comes from God. The best that man can do is natural affection, but only God’s love is agape. The best is often the enemy of the highest, and God always aims at the highest.
As our spirit is exercised before God, we begin to see how our emotion is misdirected and misused, how it leads us away from God, and how it hinders our following of Christ.
Only by being willing to take up our cross and lose our self-life for Christ’s sake can we gain the true life.
Look at our Lord Jesus. While He was on earth, He was a most affectionate Person. You find that the Bible often says that when He saw the people, He was moved with compassion.
How considerate He always was. The shortest verse in the Bible is, “Jesus wept.” He was full of sympathy. He was a most emotional Person.
For a man to weep before others may be considered a shame, but not our Lord Jesus. Yet His emotion was never for Himself. He denied His emotion and followed what the Father said. He did not cry for Himself.
Look at Paul. It is the same thing. If you read Philippians 3, you find how he counted all things as loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus. He had only one passion, and for that he was willing to let go of everything.
He felt deeply. He told the Corinthian believers that he was willing to spend and be spent for them. He did not cry for himself; he cried for his own brethren, the Jews.
He was willing even to have his name erased from the book of life for his brethren’s sake. His emotion was purified.
But this is through the exercise of the spirit, by receiving the cross in life.
Brothers and sisters, how about our relationship with God? Do we love Him more than anything else? Can we say with the psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee?”
The Lord has to deal with our emotion. How much of our emotion has He dealt with? That will be the salvation of the soul.
Recently, I was reading a biography. I noticed that when he was twenty years old, in 1934, he felt the call of God to send him to the country places to preach the gospel.
It was really a cross for him, because he knew that his parents hoped that in the future he would be rich and would be able to take care of them.
He struggled over this matter for two months. Two verses were given to him by God. One was Matthew 10:37: “He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.”
The other was Luke 14:26. In the original, it is, “If any man cometh unto Me, and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.”
Again I will say, there is nothing wrong with love or hate. These are simply expressions of our emotion. The problem is this: do you love what you should love, or hate what you should hate?
If we hate what we should love and love what we should hate, then there is something drastically wrong.
These two verses were given to him by the Lord, and he felt that the Lord was asking him, “I have spoken to you with these words. How will you react? Are you willing to take up your cross and follow Me? Are you willing to lose your life?”
He was touched by the love of Christ. It was not an easy way. It was the way of the cross. That is how the Lord purified him.
I believe that in this matter of emotion, God must deal with every one of us. He loves us so much. Unless our emotion is saved, our way before the Lord will not be straight.
So, dear brothers and sisters, emotion is not something to be dealt with in itself. It is the self-life that must be replaced by Christ.
May the Lord show mercy to us.
Dear Lord, we have mentioned Thy Word. May Thy Word become our life, that our emotional life may be sanctified, that Thou mayest be expressed, and that our self-life may be put aside. Amen.